An Assassination Freeze

‘I have confidence,” writes Father Joseph A. O’Hare, SJ, in the October 23 issue of America, “that the Church in Nicaragua will resolve its problems without the aid of selfappointed protectors in this country who rise to high indignation if someone talks back to an archbishop in Nicaragua but are wondrously indifferent to the murder of an archbishop in El Salvador. The truth will not be found in such hypocrisy.” His editorial is, on the whole, a good one. Yet it does use a literary device Susan Sontag not long ago unmasked in her famous talk at Town Hall.

That device is to pair Marxist-Leninists, on one side, with anti-Communists, on the other. Fair enough, one supposes. But the zinger is that, on the American Left, it is always the anti-Communists who get zapped hardest.

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Michael Novak

Michael Novak was a Catholic philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

‘I have confidence,” writes Father Joseph A. O’Hare, SJ, in the October 23 issue of America, “that the Church in Nicaragua will resolve its problems without the aid of selfappointed protectors in this country who rise to high indignation if someone talks back to an archbishop in Nicaragua but are wondrously indifferent to the murder of an archbishop in El Salvador. The truth will not be found in such hypocrisy.” His editorial is, on the whole, a good one. Yet it does use a literary device Susan Sontag not long ago unmasked in her famous talk at Town Hall.

That device is to pair Marxist-Leninists, on one side, with anti-Communists, on the other. Fair enough, one supposes. But the zinger is that, on the American Left, it is always the anti-Communists who get zapped hardest.